Three Invaluable Tools No Agile Team Should Have to Live Without

Scrum first appeared on our radar for a different reason than it shows up for most teams. Since we’re in the business of automating software project management methodologies, we learned about Scrum early on. At first, we viewed it as just another methodology that we wanted to make sure our software, OnTime Scrum (back then, it was just OnTime), would accommodate. Since the day we began adapting OnTime for the Scrum process, it has been a huge priority on our roadmap. Likewise, the more we dove into the methodology for development purposes, the more we realized that we wanted to adopt this methodology internally. Today Scrum is embedded within Axosoft’s company culture of getting things done. For example, our entire company participates in stand-up meetings — not just the dev team — as we strive to become an agile company, not just a company with a single department that uses an agile process. Along the way, we’ve created some tools to help people understand and implemenmt Scrum.

Invaluable Tool #1: Learn Scrum in Under 10 Minutes

Like many organizations, we sent several of our team members to Scrum training, but then we saw the need for a quick presentation to get everyone else in the company (and future new hires) up to speed with high-level concepts. So, to get our own team where it needed to be quickly, we developed what would become (much to our surprise!) the world’s most-viewed and highest-rated Scrum video ever created. As of this writing, the original video has been viewed over 650,000 times. Here’s an updated version that we released just a couple of months ago.

Invaluable Tool #2: The Scrum Diagram

The video did its job explaining the high level concepts of Scrum in about 8 minutes. Next, we challenged ourselves to create a visual tool that could a) summarize the process visually at-a-glance and b) could be referred to more easily than the video. Our Scrum Diagram was born, and it proved to be perfect for sharing and printing.

Invaluable Tool #3: OnTime Scrum

Of course, the ultimate Scrum tool we offer is the one that our team eats, breathes, and sleeps: OnTime Scrum. Understanding Scrum is important, but once you understand it — it needs to stay out of the way so you can actually get things done. That’s where OnTime Scrum comes in. Backlog management, sprint and release management, and burndown charts exist to make dev teams stronger, not to give them extra overhead to futz around with. OnTime automates these important aspects of Scrum, and it has a lot of other features that make developers’ and managers’ lives easier: workflow automation, notifications and alerts, security roles, work logs, SCM & IDE integration, serious customization to ensure a good fit, and it’s mobile ready. OnTime is refreshingly easy to use, yet it has an enterprise-level feature set. It’s extremely fast, and we don’t even have to add the qualification “…for a hosted software product.” It’s gmail fast, keyboard shortcuts and all. Rounding out the trifecta, it’s unbelievably affordable at just $7 per user (small teams of 10 or fewer users get it for even less!).